Apple has it wrong - MacBook Air

Apple has had a pretty good track record of introducing innovative and well designed products at their annual MacWorld Expo over the past 4 to 5 years. However, this year's MacWorld keynote by Steve Jobs has gotten it all wrong. Here is the final part of my article detailing what I think went wrong.


Part Four: MacBook Air
When I first saw the new sub-notebook introduced by Apple, my first thought was that it is designed for the working woman. The MacBook Air is something a sales person or insurance would want to carry around for their jobs. Indeed the petite svelte notebook would even help enhance the sales pitch.

Things started going downhill once it was apparent that Apple has made a lot of compromises on the world's thinnest notebook. For example, the lack of an Etherenet port means that you can only connect the MacBook Air to a wireless network. Personally, that is the killer issue for me. Apple is assuming that wireless networks are now ubiquitous and that we can connect to any wireless network we wish. The reality is quite different. Yes, wireless networks are quite common these days but most companies also understand the security risks involved and either intentionally do not deploy a wireless network or only provide very restricted access to company resources via a wireless network. Even with Singapore and its Wireless@SG initiative, not every public area has a usable wireless connection. In the United States, I have stayed in hotels such as the Holiday Inn near Washington, Double Tree in New York that only offer wired network connections in every room. These are all stumbling blocks that a roaming user of the MacBook Air will face on a daily basis.

The single USB port is another issue that complicate matters because it means having to lug around an additional USB hub to expand the number of USB ports available. Apple could have used an internal built in hub and save its users the hassle. Besides the two issues I have mentioned, there are a host of other myriad issues that comes from the compromises Apple has made to come up with such a tiny laptop. Issues such as slow bootups, an extremely hot base and so on.

My guess is the market will view MacBook Air as a niche product that will be purchased for its looks and small size. Thanks to Steve Job's reality distortion field, MacBook Air might turn out to be a popular item but I am thinking it will never be as popular as its bigger brothers, the MacBook and MacBook Pro.